The present invention can be widely employed in fabricating a semiconductor and/or electronic device material for semiconductor device, a liquid crystal device or the like. For the convenience of explanation, a background technology of a semiconductor device will now be exemplarily illustrated.
Semiconductor devices have been conventionally developed to achieve an ever higher integration and performance level by reducing the design rule. However, if the design rule becomes finer (for example, equal to or less than 0.18 μm or so), a wiring resistance and an inter-wiring capacitance are increased considerably and hence it becomes difficult to improve the performance of a device beyond a certain level in case of using a conventional wiring material.
For example, in order to increase an operating speed of a semiconductor device, it is necessary to enhance the speed of an electric signal. However, if a semiconductor device having a conventional aluminum wiring is scaled down to the aforementioned level (for example, equal to or less than 0.18 μm or so), there occurs a limit in the speed of an electric signal flowing in a circuit of the semiconductor device (a so-called wiring delay occurs). Therefore, it becomes necessary to employ a wiring made of a material such as Cu having a lower electric resistance than that of aluminum. Cu has a characteristic that a wiring delay is small and thus electricity can flow smoothly even in a wiring of a small cross section, due to its lower electric resistance than that of aluminum.
In case of using such a material as Cu having a low electric resistance as described above, an insulating film employed therefor needs to be the one capable of more effectively preventing the leak of electricity therethrough. This is because, with such a combination of a Cu wiring through which electricity is easy to flow and an insulating film through which electricity is difficult to leak, a semiconductor device operating at an extremely high speed can be manufactured.
A SiO2 film (a relative dielectric constant=4.1) was employed as an insulating film in the era of the conventional aluminum wiring. However, in case of employing a Cu wiring, an insulating film having a far lower relative dielectric constant (Low-k) than that of the SiO2 film becomes necessary. In general, a Low-k film stands for a film having a relative dielectric constant of 3.0 or less.
Two methods are conventionally known for producing such a Low-k film. One of the two methods is to employ a CVD apparatus. Though a high quality Low-k film can be produced by this method, the manufacturing productivity of the Low-k film is naturally low and, thus, the running cost thereof is high. The other method is to coat a fluidic Low-k material such as liquid on a substrate or the like by using, e.g., a spin coater (method for forming a so-called SOD (Spin On Dielectric) insulating film).
This coating method is advantageous in that its running cost is low and its productivity is high.
In the coating method, a process (a curing process based on a reaction of, e.g., a crosslinking) of curing a coating film coated on, e.g., a substrate should be carried out in order to improve the film quality of an insulating film. However, if wiring layers constituting a semiconductor device are of a multilayer for example, an excessive thermal budget is imposed on the corresponding coating films or the insulating films formed by the curing thereof, and as a result, there occurs a problem that the insulating films made up of the corresponding coating films can be easily degraded.